DECENNIAL
_Cœur de Lion_ suffered from cardiac depression in the heat of July and
ceased to beat half-way through the month. Although Mr. Percy Mortimer
offered Nancy a part in his autumn production, he did not offer her a
higher salary. Not only had she been unable to save a penny in London;
she had had to draw heavily on what remained of her savings when she
had paid her father’s debts. No doubt, if she stayed on at the Athenæum
she should gradually establish herself as a London actress, but should
she ever save any money? She felt that she lacked the temperament to
become a star. Even if she had had the consuming white-hot ambition,
she did not possess the necessary personality. For one thing she was
too useful an actress. She would always be given parts that were
difficult to fill, obviously. She would never establish herself as the
one actress who could play one particular kind of part. Nevertheless,
to refuse a good part in the forthcoming production at the Athenæum was
not an easy thing to do. Another conspicuous success would mean a rise
of salary for the next production and, were there nothing for her at
the Athenæum, she might surely count on a good engagement at another
theatre. Then there was Letizia in London, and it was so jolly to be
able to see her almost every day. She seemed to grow more amusing and
interesting and adorable all the time. There were many years yet before
she should be wanting that money to launch her on whatever career she
chose. Would she choose the stage? Probably. Plenty of personality
there. With the natural sense of the theatre she must inherit from
both sides she would stand a splendid chance of becoming a really
renowned actress. But what a much greater chance she would stand if
she were not hampered by the urgent need of a livelihood. Not that
Nancy intended her daughter to be aware of her amateur status. If she
chose to be an actress, she should begin under the impression that
there was not a farthing between herself and starvation in the event of
failure. But once she secured a London engagement, why, then the money
to dress herself, the money to be able to turn up her nose at a small
salary, the money to flick her fingers in the face of any manager—— But
Letizia’s début was a long way off yet. She might not choose the stage;
and was it risking so much for her mother to stay on and enjoy the
amenity of acting in London?
Nancy was on the point of settling for the autumn with Mr. Mortimer
when an actor with whom she had played in two provincial companies
before Bram’s death offered her £7 a week to go out on tour with him
in a repertory of Robertson’s plays—£7 a week in the country was the
equivalent of £10 a week in town. Nancy flung away any hope of fame,
flung away the amenity of the London stage, flung away the pleasure
of seeing Letizia every day, and became once more a strolling player,
wandering the next ten years up and down the length of England, in and
out of Wales, over to Ireland, and across the border into Scotland.
She never sang any more except at festive gatherings to celebrate some
Bohemian occasion; but if she sang no more on the stage, neither did
she play another adventuress. Her engagements were nearly always with
number one companies for number one towns. Having once achieved £7 a
week, she never acted again for less, and without stinting herself too
much or denying herself a month’s rest she managed to put by £100 every
year.
Until Letizia was twelve she was allowed to spend the summer holidays
with her mother, who was, of course, always on tour in August, so
that Letizia had plenty of experience of theatrical life in her
impressionable childhood. At the age of eleven she fell very much in
love with a good-looking actor of forty-five, a member of the company
with which her mother was touring. At first Nancy was amused by this
precocious passion and had many jokes about it with Mr. Bernard
Drake, the object of Letizia’s adoration. But when, notwithstanding
the bracing air of Blackpool, Letizia began to grow thin and pale
and hollow-eyed and altogether thoroughly love-sick, Nancy became
anxious about her health and begged Drake not to encourage her little
daughter by any kind of “let’s pretend.” The next week the company was
playing at Douglas, and Letizia was no better in spite of all sorts of
amusements and thrills that included a personal introduction by Mr.
Drake to several freaks then being shown at one of the halls by the sea
for which Douglas was famous in those days.
“What _is_ the matter, Letizia? Aren’t you enjoying your time with me?”
They were sitting among the heather beyond the town, looking at the
calm sea and the curve of the long _marina_.
“Oh, yes, I’m enjoying myself terribly,” said Letizia in woebegone
accents. “Only, in another month I shall have to go back to school.”
“But the holidays aren’t half over yet,” her mother pointed out.
“No, not yet,” Letizia sighed. “But they _will_ be over.”
“Would you like to invite Mrs. Pottage to come and stay with us next
week—no, next week is Llandudno and Rhyl—the week after at Hastings?”
“No, thank you, mother. She’ll only laugh all the time at everything.”
“Letizia, do not be so ridiculous. It’s only during the last fortnight
that you’ve not been laughing at everything all the time yourself.”
“I don’t think I shall ever laugh again,” Letizia groaned.
“Why on earth not?”
“Because I want so dreadfully to be grown up.”
“Well, you can’t go on moping for the next seven years, my dear.”
“Will I be grown up in seven years?” Letizia asked, brightening. “That
isn’t so very long, is it? I’m more than half-way already.... Mother?”
she resumed.
“Yes?”
“When does a bearded lady begin to grow a beard? I couldn’t suddenly
become a bearded lady, could I, when I was grown up?”
“Of course not, you noodle.”
“You’re quite sure?” Letizia pressed.
“Positive.”
“The bearded lady was very nice when I shook hands with her,” said
Letizia pensively. “But I wouldn’t much like to kiss her if I was a
man, would you?”
“Not at all,” Nancy declared with a grimace.
“Mother?”
“What now?”
“Do you think she’d mind if I asked her if she had any bits of beard
when she was eleven?”
“No, darling, I don’t want you to meet those freaks again. I can’t
think why Mr. Drake ever introduced you to them. It was very naughty of
him.”
Letizia turned a pale and reproachful face to her mother.
“I think Mr. Drake is the nicest man who ever lived,” she proclaimed
solemnly. Then in a voice that strove to to be nonchalant, she asked
how old he was.
“About forty-five.”
“Mother?”
“Still another puzzle for poor me?”
“Is fifty-two frightfully old for a man to be?”
“Very old indeed.”
“Too old to marry?”
“Much too old,” said Nancy decidedly.
Letizia uttered a sigh of unutterable despair, and in spite of
everything that her mother could do, in spite of a boisterous visit
from Mrs. Pottage to Hastings, she remained in a state of gloom all
through the summer holidays. Moreover, Sister Catherine wrote to Nancy
half-way through the next term that she was so worried about Letizia’s
health that she thought it would be wise if she went to Belgium early
in the New Year, as London did not seem to be suiting her. Nancy
wondered if she should say anything about her unfortunate passion for
a middle-aged actor, but decided that it might give a wrong impression
to the nuns and kept silence. She was glad she had, when soon after
Letizia’s arrival in Belgium she received a letter full of excitement
and good spirits. The sickness of love was evidently cured. But that it
could endure so long at the age of eleven made Nancy a little anxious
about her daughter’s emotional future.
Four years passed while Letizia was at school in Belgium. There were
changes among the Sisters of the Holy Infancy. Mother Mary Ethelreda
died and was laid to rest in the soil which her ancestors had held
long ago by the sword. Sister Catherine was elected mother-superior.
Sister Rose became head-mistress of St. Joseph’s. There were no changes
in Nancy’s existence apart from the change every week from one town
to another. She never heard of Kenrick nowadays. He had passed out of
her life as if he had never been. Mrs. Pottage was growing old, and
for the first time since Bram’s death Nancy visited Starboard Alley to
celebrate the old lady’s seventieth birthday.
Aggie Wilkinson was there looking now almost as old as Mrs. Pottage and
in some respects a good deal older, though she was still alluded to by
her mistress as if she were in short skirts.
“Pore little thing, it does her good to get about a bit on those
crutches of hers. She likes a jollification as much as I do myself.
She’s been helping me with the birthday cake, and which I don’t mind
telling you is a proper mammoth and no mistake. It ’ud make Mong Blong
look like a fourpenny lemon-ice.”
Mrs. Bugbird was there, and Nancy thought that she too looked a proper
mammoth, so much fatter had she grown with the years.
“It’s to be a nice cosy little party,” Mrs. Pottage announced. “In fact
we’re all here now except one.”
With this she winked at Mrs. Bugbird, who shook with her accustomed
laughter, though she was now so immense that she could scarcely fall
off any chair, and not very easily fall off a sofa.
Nancy gratified her hostess by displaying a great deal of curiosity
about the missing guest.
“He’s my one and only left,” Mrs. Pottage said. “No, I’m joking. He
isn’t what you’d call a suitor at all. In fact, he wouldn’t suit
anybody. He’s just a nice quiet old fellow called Hayhoe who likes to
pop in of a evening and smoke his pipe in my kitchen. He’s been in
Australia all his life, and when he come home again he found all his
friends and relations was dead and buried. So the pore old boy’s a bit
lonely, and he enjoys himself telling the tale to me about Australia,
and which seems to me from what I can make out of it a much larger
place than what you’d think. And on Sunday to pass the time he blows
the organ. He says that’s the only way he can go to church without
missing his pipe, though whether because the organ has pipes and to
spare or because he’s for ever puffing at the bellows I never could
rightly make out. He’s entertained Mrs. B. and I a lot this last
winter, and he’s very handy with a hammer and nails. In fact, we call
him the jumping kangaroo among ourselves. Hush, here he comes.”
Perhaps Mr. Hayhoe was abashed by the presence of a stranger, for he
certainly did not jump about at all that afternoon, but sat small and
silent in a corner of Mrs. Pottage’s room until he was called upon to
help cut the cake, which he did with the air of performing a surgical
operation.
“Well, I shall certainly do my best to live a bit longer,” Mrs. Pottage
declared when she was responding to the good wishes of her guests,
“for the longer I live, the more I enjoy myself. Oh, dear, I do wish
I’d have been a month or two younger though, and then Letitsia could
have been with us this afternoon. She _has_ been away a time. Talk
about Brussels sprouts, she _will_ be a Brussels sprout by now, and no
mistake. You mark my words, Mrs. Bugbird, that child’ll come home a
walking maypole.”
And certainly Letizia did seem the most enormous creature to her mother
when they met again, with her skirts half-way between her knees and her
ankles and her dark-brown wavy hair in a tight pigtail.
“Fancy, having a flapper for a daughter,” Nancy exclaimed.
“I know, isn’t it too perfectly beastly, mother. I hope Sister Rose
will let me fluff my hair out again. After all, I’m only just fifteen,
and I don’t want to be grown up before I need be. But I don’t expect
she will. She was always the strictest of the lot. I can’t _think_ why
they made her head-mistress of St. Joseph’s.”
Sister Rose felt that it was her duty to try and quell some of
Letizia’s exuberance, and throughout the next year Nancy was getting
letters from her daughter about “rows.” With all her strictness Sister
Rose seemed much less capable than Sister Catherine of keeping her
pupils in order; or perhaps it was that Letizia was now one of the big
girls and consequently involved in much more serious escapades than
those of the juniors. Then came the most tremendous row the school had
ever known, according to Letizia.
St. Joseph’s School,
Sisters of the Holy Infancy,
5 Arden Grove,
N. W.,
May 15, 1906.
Darling Mother,
There’s been the most frightful row, and it looks as if one or two
of us will get the boot. I don’t think I shall because I’m not in
up to the hilt. But it’s all very thunderous, and Reverend Mother
has been sent for to deal with matters. What happened was this. You
know the backs of the houses in Stanwick Terrace look down into our
garden? Well, one of the girls—I’ll mention no names because a deadly
system of espionage has been instituted—we’ll call her Cora which
sounds an evil and profligate name. Cora met a youth, well, as a
matter of fact, he’s not such a youth, because he’s left Cambridge.
So he must be about 22. Cora met him during the Easter Hols, and was
most fearfully smitten. So they arranged to correspond. In fact she
considers herself engaged to him. Which of course is piffle, because
she’s only sixteen. She asked me to be one of her confidantes now,
and later on a bridesmaid, and get hold of her notes. Oh, I forgot
to say that this youth lives in Stanwick Terrace. So, he used to put
them under a flower-pot on the garden wall. But the silly idiots
weren’t content with notes. They found that they could easily signal
to one another from their rooms, and they arranged a code. Two
candles in the window meant “My darling, I love you madly”; and all
that sort of piffle. Cora used to work her messages with the blind,
and I and Joan Hutchinson, the other girl who shares a room with
her, got rather fed up with her pulling the blind up and down in a
passionate ecstasy. So I said, “Why don’t you go out and talk to him
over the garden wall? We’ll let you down with a sheet, which will be
rather a rag.” As a matter of fact that’s just what it was; because
the beastly sheet busted, and there was poor Cora dancing about
by the light of the moon in a nightgown and a mackintosh. Sister
Margaret, who has apocalyptic visions every night, thought Cora—oh,
I’m sick of calling her by a false name, and anyway if some stuffy
old nun does open this and read it, well, I hope she’ll enjoy it. I
do hate espionage. Don’t you? We’ve only had it here since Sister
Rose succeeded to the throne. Well, Sister Margaret was looking out
of her window just as the sheet busted and dropped Enid Wilson—that’s
the girl—down into the garden. She at once thought it was a miracle,
and rushed to Sister Monica who sleeps in the next room and banged on
her door and said. “Oh, sister! Our Lady has just descended into the
garden.” Tableau vivant! There’s a picture for you! Of course Joan
and I were simply in fits. Anyway there’s the most terrific row on
that the school has ever had. Enid is convinced that she’s going to
be expelled. Investigations by the authorities have discovered all
about her darling Gerald. Apparently one of the gardeners found a
note and gave it to Sister Rose. Joan Hutchinson and I are in pretty
well to the hilt for letting Enid out of the window, and so at any
moment you may receive a curt note from Reverend Mother to say that I
am incorrigible and please accept delivery.
Heaps of love,
Your sinister child
Letizia.
That’s what Sister Rose thinks I am. She said to me, “I cannot help
thinking, Letizia, that you have played a very sinister part in this
sorry affair.”
Nancy immediately wrote a stern letter to Letizia, reproaching her for
not appreciating what the nuns had done for her, and by the same post
she wrote to Mother Catherine, pleading for a lenient view of what she
assured her was really more a thoughtless prank than a serious and
premeditated piece of naughtiness.
Perhaps Mother Catherine decided that Sister Rose’s methods tended to
make her pupils rebel against them by outrageous behaviour. At any
rate, Sister Rose went to take charge of the house at Eastbourne and
rule the indigent maiden ladies provided for therein. Sister Perpetua
came down from Beaumanoir to be head-mistress; and there were no more
letters from Letizia about rows, for Sister Perpetua, like Mother
Catherine, was never strict for the sake of strictness, but wise and
holy and human.
That year Nancy was acting in the North, so she spent Christmas at
Beaumanoir with Mother Catherine. Snow was lying thick on the moors
when she arrived. It reminded her of that Christmas eleven years ago
when Mother Mary Ethelreda was still alive.
Mother Catherine had changed very little with passing time. Her
tranquil azure eyes had lost none of their fiery compassion, none of
their grave and sweet comprehension. By half-past three when Nancy
arrived at the convent a dusk heavy with unladen snow was creeping over
the moor, and the candles were already lighted in the Reverend Mother’s
parlour.
“I have been so distressed over Letizia’s behaviour,” said Nancy. “I
cannot think what happened to her last spring.”
“Don’t upset yourself about her, my dear child,” Mother Catherine
replied, patting Nancy’s hand. “She is quite herself again now, and
in any case it was really nothing more than the normal exuberance of
youth. Frankly, I am pleased to find her relatively much younger now
than she was before she went to Belgium.”
“But I was so shocked at her apparent ingratitude,” Nancy sighed.
Mother Catherine shook her head.
“She is not ungrateful. You must remember that she has been at school
many, many years now. I can easily understand that St. Joseph’s must be
seeming irksome, and that is one of the reasons why I am glad to have
this chance of talking over with you a plan that is in my mind. I must
tell you that dear Mother Mary Ethelreda left the Community very well
endowed, and there is a fund set apart for the benefit of any girls who
show any kind of artistic promise. They are to be helped to achieve
their ambition, no matter what it may be. As you know, Letizia has
definitely made up her mind to go on the stage....”
“She has not said so to me,” Nancy interrupted.
“Well, that of course is just what you would expect. Parents and
teachers must always expect to be suddenly confronted with the
inexplicable reserve of the young. Just as she wrote you a full account
of that foolish business with Enid Wilson and Joan Hutchinson, so
she has given me her confidence about her career. I fancy that the
instinct to entrust a secret to an outsider is a normal one. You would
be expected to regard her theatrical hopes with a professional eye just
as I should be expected to regard her escapades with a professional
eye.”
Nancy nodded her agreement with this.
“Very well,” Mother Catherine went on, “if Letizia is going on the
stage it is important that she should now concentrate on deportment,
elocution, dancing, singing, and all the graces that will adorn her
vocation. Another of our pupils longs to paint, and another who shows
signs of having a really lovely voice wishes to become a singer. I
propose to send these three young cousins of the Muses for a couple of
years to Italy with a _dame de compagnie_. Thus each one will be able
to study what will most help her afterwards.”
“To Italy!” Nancy exclaimed.
“I don’t think Letizia will ever have a voice as good as her mother’s,”
the nun said, with a smile. “And that reminds me, will you sing _Adeste
Fideles_ for us at the midnight Mass?”
“Oh, I never sing nowadays,” Nancy replied, the tears standing bright
in her eyes at the thought of the delight that was in store for that
little daughter—a walking maypole now perhaps, but still so much her
little daughter.
“But you must sing for us,” Mother Catherine insisted. “We want to
hear your voice roll out above our thin notes. It is so dreadful, this
news that the French Government has forbidden midnight Mass in any of
the French cathedrals or churches this year. What woes that wretched
country is calling down upon itself! It will hearten us to hear your
voice singing that wonderful old hymn.”
Nancy felt that it would sound like affectation to refuse after this,
and into her voice at midnight she put all the triumph, all the
gladness, all the gratitude in her mother-heart.
So, for the next two years Letizia was writing home to England the most
absorbing accounts of Rome, where she and her companions spent most of
their time, though on different occasions they visited all the famous
cities of Italy. While up and down the length of England, in and out of
Wales, over to Ireland, and across the border into Scotland wandered
her mother.